Small Gods

belly?”
    “So the purified ashes can be let out,” said Brutha. “And the smoke issues forth from the nostrils, as a sign to the ungodly.”
    The tortoise craned its neck around at the rows of barred doors. It looked up at the soot-encrusted walls. It looked down at the now empty fire trench under the iron bull. It reached a conclusion. It blinked its one eye.
    “People?” it said eventually. “You roast people in it?”
    “There!” said Brutha triumphantly. “And thus you prove you are not the Great God! He would know that of course we do not burn people in there. Burn people in there? That would be unheard of!”
    “Ah,” said the tortoise. “Then what—?”
    “It is for the destruction of heretical materials and other such rubbish,” said Brutha.
    “Very sensible,” said the tortoise.
    “ Sinners and criminals are purified by fire in the Quisition’s pits or sometimes in front of the Great Temple,” said Brutha. “The Great God would know that.”
    “I think I must have forgotten,” said the tortoise quietly.
    “The Great God Om”—holy horns—“would know that He Himself said unto the Prophet Wallspur—” Brutha coughed and assumed the creased-eyebrow squint that meant serious thought was being undertaken. “‘Let the holy fire destroy utterly the unbeliever.’ That’s verse sixty-five.”
    “Did I say that?”
    “In the Year of the Lenient Vegetable the Bishop Kreeblephor converted a demon by the power of reason alone,” said Brutha. “It actually joined the Church and became a subdeacon. Or so it is said.”
    “ Fighting I don’t mind,” the tortoise began.
    “Your lying tongue cannot tempt me, reptile,” said Brutha. “For I am strong in my faith!”
    The tortoise grunted with effort.
    “Smite you with thunderbolts!”
    A small, a very small black cloud appeared over Brutha’s head and a small, a very small bolt of lightning lightly singed an eyebrow.
    It was about the same strength as the spark off a cat’s fur in hot dry weather.
    “Ouch!”
    “ Now do you believe me?” said the tortoise.

    There was a bit of breeze on the roof of the Citadel. It also offered a good view of the high desert.
    Fri’it and Drunah waited for a while to get their breath back.
    Then Fri’it said, “Are we safe up here?”
    Drunah looked up. An eagle circled over the dry hills. He found himself wondering how good an eagle’s hearing was. It certainly was good at something. Was it hearing? It could hear a creature half a mile below in the silence of the desert. What the hells—it couldn’t talk as well, could it?
    “Probably,” he said.
    “Can I trust you?” said Fri’it.
    “Can I trust you? ”
    Fri’it drummed his fingers on the parapet.
    “Uh,” he said.
    And that was the problem. It was the problem of all really secret societies. They were secret . How many members did the Turtle Movement have? No one knew, exactly. What was the name of the man beside you? Two other members knew, because they would have introduced him, but who were they behind these masks? Because knowledge was dangerous. If you knew, the inquisitions could wind it slowly out of you. So you made sure you didn’t know. This made conversation much easier during cell meetings, and impossible outside of them.
    It was the problem of all tentative conspirators throughout history: how to conspire without actually uttering words to an untrusted possible fellow conspirator which, if reported, would point the accusing red-hot poker of guilt.
    The little beads of sweat on Drunah’s forehead, despite the warm breeze, suggested that the secretary was agonizing along the same lines. But it didn’t prove it. And for Fri’it, not dying had become a habit.
    He clicked his knuckles nervously.
    “A holy war,” he said. That was safe enough. The sentence included no verbal clue to what Fri’it thought about the prospect. He hadn’t said, “Ye god, not a damn holy war, is the man insane? Some idiot missionary gets himself killed, some man writes some gibberish about the shape of the world, and we have to go to war?” If pressed, and indeed stretched and broken, he could always claim that his meaning had been “At last! A not-to-be-missed opportunity to die gloriously for Om, the one true God, who shall Trample the Unrighteous with Hooves of Iron!” It wouldn’t make a lot of difference, evidence never did once you were in the deep levels where accusation had the status of proof, but at least it might